“Two Indiana plants that make products for the heating, ventilating and air conditioning industry are shifting their manufacturing operations to Mexico, which will cost about 2,100 workers their jobs, company officials announced Wednesday.

Carrier is shuttering its manufacturing facility on Indianapolis’ west side, eliminating about 1,400 jobs during the next three years.”

Video: Carrier Air Conditioner (part of United Technologies) Moving 2,100 Jobs to Mexico

Video: Indiana workers explode when told their jobs are moving to Mexico

– deathandtaxesmag.com

“Some 1,400 people will lose their jobs when the plant moves to Mexico. Theirs are only the latest lost due to the effects of the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement, which allowed U.S. companies to shift production to Mexico where they could pay three dollars an hour, not have to worry about unions, child labor laws, or work safety, and then ship their product back to the U.S. duty and restriction free.

NAFTA was widely supported by Republicans in congress, heralded by President Bill Clinton and defended by First Lady Hillary Clinton. While serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton championed the similarly criticized Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement, recently signed into law by President Obama, but came out against it around the time she announced her candidacy for president.”

NAFTA at 20 – New Report from Public Citizens’ Global Trade Watch

– PublicCitizens.org

“The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect on January 1, 1994.

NAFTA opponents – including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups – argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food safety standards.

NAFTA promoters – including many of the world’s largest corporations – promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a booming new market for U.S. exports.

Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment – never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA, “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods betweencountries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws – regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils.”